At last, after more horrors, Vitigis and his Goths were driven into Ravenna. Justinian treated for peace; and then followed a strange peripeteia, which we have, happily, from an eye-witness, Procopius himself. The Roman generals outside confessed their chance of success hopeless. The Goths inside, tired of the slow Vitigis, send out to the great Belisarius, Will he be their king? King over them there in Italy? He promised, meaning to break his promise; and to the astonishment and delight of the Romans, the simple and honest barbarians opened the gates of Ravenna, and let in him and his Romans, to find themselves betrayed and enslaved. 'When I saw our troops march in,' says Procopius, 'I felt it was God's doing, so to turn their minds. The Goths,' he says, 'were far superior in numbers and in strength; and their women, who had fancied these Romans to be mighty men of valour, spit in the faces of their huge husbands, and pointing to the little Romans, reproached them with having surrendered to such things as that.' But the folly was committed. Belisarius carried them away captive to Constantinople, and so ended the first act of the Gothic war. In the moment of victory the envy of the Byzantine court undid all that it had done. Belisarius returned with his captives to Rome, not for a triumph, but for a disgrace; and Italy was left open to the Goths, if they had men and heart to rise once more. And they did rise. Among the remnant of the race was left a hero, Totila by name;--a Teuton of the ancient stamp. Totilas, 'free from death'--'the deathless one,' they say his name means. Under him the nation rose once more as out of the ground.